February 2011 Archives

During the past few weeks of Egypt's social unrest leading up to President Hosni Mubarak struggling to hang on to power, a particular topic has been on my mind: how food pricing, deregulated genetically-modified food, and corporate greed link together to result in social symptoms like what we're seeing in Egypt or like what we have been seeing on the immigration front right here in the United States. I blogged about this very same topic over at Project Economic Refugee, focusing on how food prices have contributed to social instability in Egypt and in Mexico. On that post, I referenced an article that was published on The Nation magazine on corn pricing's impact on migration from Mexico to the United States that referenced how:

By some estimates, dispossessed farmers account for almost half of the 500,000 or so Mexicans who, until the recent recession, immigrated illegally to the United States each year.

The founder of the Project Economic Refugee blog joins Citizen Orange as its newest writer. Meet Refugio "Reg", a Mexican-American blogger from Los Angeles, California who fights for environmental justice by day and for immigrants' rights by night.